Hit send%

I have a bit of a mental block that sometimes stops me from beginning new things. It’s different than the fear of failure or of looking stupid – after all, I know that one of the best ways to learn something is to fail quickly as many times as possible, and continue trying. In any discipline there’s a big spike of learning at the beginning, when the novelty alone can keep you persevering even if you make lots of mistakes. And later on at an intermediate level, the way to keep learning is to be “the worst musician in the room,” right? If you keep an open mind, then spending time with those better than you is the exact right way to progress.

I think my problem is a little different than that fear of making mistakes. Before I even sit down to start working on something, my mind jumps ahead to what I want the outcome to be, and how much work I might need to put in to get there; and then I don’t start at all. Even though I know that all large projects are the result of many small sessions added together, I get overwhelmed and give up before I can even sit down to begin. A part of me is afraid that I’ll get halfway and not be able to see things through afterwards; another part thinks that if I’m not going to make something great, it’s better not to do anything at all, since the world doesn’t need any more mediocre art. These are both thinly-veiled excuses.

Choosing whether or not to share a finished product, or deciding whether something is finished at all, isn’t connected whatsoever to the moment of beginning. Letting my mind jump ahead to a hypothetical future isn’t helpful, and is nothing more than a paralyzing factor. Lately I’m trying to separate those concerns from each other so that I can focus only on the current moment. What can I make now? What can I do in one hour, or thirty minutes, or five minutes? When I feel that urge to create, how quickly can I fast-forward through the excuses and get started? How can I treat it like a speedrun, mashing my way through the intro cutscenes to get control of the player character?

I used to watch a lot of speedruns and challenge runs. Sometimes the idea is to collect everything in the game and then get to the end credits (a 100% run). Sometimes it’s to get there as quickly as possible even if it skips parts of the story (Any%). There are minimalist challenges where you collect as little as possible before the credits, there are pacifist runs, anything to change up the gameplay a bit. Some games have all sorts of interesting speedrun categories. I’m trying to approach my creative practice a little bit like that lately – not rushing the creative process itself, but getting past the excuses as quickly as possible to get the first word onto paper, the first note out of the speaker, the first stitch pulled through. I want to get the foundation of what I’m doing set as quickly as possible, since I know from experience that once I have a little momentum I’ll be fine with the follow-through. I just need to get past the mental hurdle stopping me from beginning.

In my mind I’m calling this “Hit send%.” Of course the point is not to throw something together and send it when it’s half-baked; but I know that if I sit down with this idea in mind, it’ll be easy to make it past the first five minutes, and then we’re out of the beginning paralysis stage. The further I get, the less my internal excuses are able to keep me from progressing. Plus, I can never say no to a good challenge run, right?